


sigh no more

by tiffanyachings



Category: Poldark (TV 2015), Poldark - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Introspection, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spooning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 22:45:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15496377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiffanyachings/pseuds/tiffanyachings
Summary: In which Dwight has one foot on sea and one on shore.





	sigh no more

**Author's Note:**

> written originally for fuckyeahdwightcaroline's fanwork week in 2017 and finally finished for fuckyeahdwightcaroline's fanwork week in 2018.
> 
> title from much ado about nothing. or the mumford and sons song. have your pick, but i prefer maan.

So there it is. Everything he has longed for, right in front of him.

It’s been a rare good day, warm, but not muggy, and Killewarren’s garden is in full bloom. The entire place is bathed in a quiet peacefulness, just the kind of he has yearned for ever since he settled in Cornwall, twenty-four and wide-eyed with idealism. 

Wide-eyed Dwight now stares at the fruits piled up in a small bowl on his bedside table, barely more than vague silhouettes against the single candle he likes to keep burning. He’ll sleep, in time. He must. But not yet. A little longer…to think, to seek clarity in midst of his muddled thoughts and yearnings. To summon up the courage to close his eyes and face whatever tragedy awaits him tonight. They vary little in plot and setting, but that doesn’t soften the blows to his psyche.

But they’re not real. That chapter of his life is over, he’s safe, separated from Quimper by miles and miles of deep, dark water, and Dwight knows he should rejoice at the prospect of a life filled with joy and freedom - who would dare to show such ungratefulness and scorn a chance like this? - and yet no matter how much he tries to convince himself that the torments he witnessed and endured are nothing but a shadow of the past, it’s a shadow tainting the beauty and disturbing the serenity of this sanctuary, a shadow he can feel it on his heart and mind, dark and material and ever-present, pressing on his chest until he starts up gasping for air and -

Fruits. Dwight blinks away the darkness and fixes his eyes on the vague outline of the bowl on his bedside table again. Apples, oranges - of course there are oranges - even some wild strawberries. He can imagine how they’ll look in the daylight, their vibrant colours too bright and too beautiful, like everything in this place that shines with an almost surreal beauty. As if escaped from a dream.

That’s the truth then: Sometimes when he wakes, barked commands and the rattling breaths of dying men still echoing in his ears, Dwight can’t rightly tell if his rescue has not been a figment of his imagination, some fanciful invention conjured up by his mind to shield itself from the horrors of Quimper. After so many months of cowering in the darkness, numb fingers clasping the locket around his neck, this most precious of possessions, in desperate attempts to keep it all at bay - the hopelessness, the biting cold, the unbearable stench of the diseased, the dying, the dead - is there not reason to at least consider that his coping mechanisms may have transcended holding on to the memoriam he was given?

And what an impossible story he has fabricated, indeed! A group of men daring the journey across the English Channel, stealing themselves into a French prison, risking - God, some even losing their lives, only to rescue one insignificant second-class surgeon and bring him home safe, back to his Cornish miners and fishwives, back to their rattling lungs and scurvy-marked hands, back to a quiet study and a warm bed, back to Caroline, _Caroline…_

 

She has nestled up to him as close as possible, her pale arms slung around his waist, almost as if determined to make up for the hundreds of miles of separation they’ve endured for far too long. No doubt she’s already asleep - her head has slumped forward in a rather inelegant manner and her nose is getting squished up against the back of his neck, but that’s fine, it’s pleasant, it’s good. 

That, Dwight muses, - the warmth of her breath on his skin, the pleasant friction between their bodies when she shifts - that seems real. And even supposing this comfort should merely be a fantasy produced by his fractured sanity, would he mind? No, he thinks. Not at all. In fact, (and he can tell now he’s already one foot into Morpheus’ realm because his conscience allows him to entertain such wicked, traitorous, liberating thoughts) he could happily spend his life like that.

Because why not admit the truth? He’s glad she is here, quite literally having his back, making him feel safe. Even in Quimper, most of them had tried to sleep with the back against the wall. Dirty and cold as it had been, it had always produced an odd illusion of security. Not that it had actually saved anyone from being grabbed by the rough hands of a French guard, dragged by the neck like an animal to the slaughter, and then the shot, the noise sickeningly short, and that horrible, horrible thud…

 

No musket echoes clear the air in Killewarren’s master bedroom, but they sound in Dwight’s ears all the same. And suddenly, as if by some cruel magic, he’s back in Quimper.

A spell of sudden breathlessness comes over him, and Dwight gulps for air and clenches his teeth in a desperate attempt to fight down the panic he feels rising in him because he can’t let it, he can’t, even when it fills his lungs and threatens to drown him from the inside. His hands flutter to his chest uncontrolled and he can feel his heart pounding against his ribcage so hard as if it’s trying to escape this wreck of a person before it’s too late. He can’t wake her, Dwight thinks, not again, he always does, and she always says she doesn’t mind, but she surely must… 

Collecting all the will-power he has left, he commands his mind to focus on the absence of sound in the room, no bellowed French, no muskets, no thuds, nothing except for Caroline’s breathing, slow and deep and rhythmic. It’s the steady constant he needs, and Dwight closes his eyes and clings to it, tethers his ragged breathing to her regular one until the dumb sound of his heartbeat in his ears slows down and nothing remains but her shallow exhales.

A moment of stillness reassures him Caroline is still sound asleep. Exhausted, Dwight leans back against her gently heaving and falling chest, heaving and falling, and suddenly he is hit by the acute consciousness that beneath all the flesh and bone, their lungs are expanding, their hearts are beating, blood is pumping through their veins with such energy, Caroline’s hand on his chest must surely be vibrating with all the life he can feel flowing through him.

No trick of mind could feel so real. He’s alive. And his patients… The nausea comes back with such an overwhelming force Dwight thinks he might throw up.

He’d had a duty. A duty. How many people that had relied on his skills? Fifty? Sixty? A hundred? No doubt they’re all dead now – Enwright and Rudge and whoever was left of the Travail’s crew – dead on dirty straw and buried without a shred of dignity. So many helpless souls, and he had left them to their sorry fate with barely a glance back. 

And for what? A life of eating finely cut apples from silver plates? He can’t stand the apples and can’t stand the silver, can’t stand the comfort of his luxurious bed and its soft sheets, can’t stand the sensation of Caroline’s lips grazing the bare skin between his shoulder blades – there is no pleasure for him, not when it’s immediately followed by the stinging feeling that he has betrayed his patients and everything he stood for. How many could he have saved if only he’d stayed?

But he had left them. He had leapt at the opportunity like Horace for marzipan, hardly objected at all. ‘Is she well?’, he had asked and ‘She will not be if you stay here,’ Ross had replied briskly.

And somehow, that had settled everything. 

 

Caroline stirs a little in her sleep, and for a moment he fears she might wake, but then her two slender arms tighten around his waist again.

“To make sure you don’t steal away to the sea in the dead of night,” Caroline had explained and stuck out her chin with that radiant smile of hers, but Dwight knows her too well to be fooled by her fake jocularity.

Despite everything, he still hasn’t resigned from his post in the Navy. And, truth be told, he doesn’t have any plans to do so in the near future. Not that he wants to return – God no, the thought of it alone makes him tremble – but there is something too cowardly, too final about writing a letter asking to be relieved of his position, like he is leaving his patients behind one last time, not only in person but also in thoughts.

Caroline doesn’t understand. Of course she doesn’t. How could she fathom why her husband, whose involvement in the Navy led him through hell itself would possibly choose returning to it over staying with his wife?

“I can’t –“ Understand it myself, he thinks when she presses him to write to the Admiralty again, and explain it even less, but he never finishes the sentence.

It drives her mad, he knows that. Only the day before yesterday, she had ended up slamming the quill pen on his desk and storming out of the room in frustration. She had come back into his study two hours later, eyes red-rimmed and resigned, wrapped her arms around him and pressed her lips to his temple with a silent desperation that made something in him twist painfully. 

Dwight hates to see her like that. He hates being the cause of it even more.

A stronger man would never allow himself to burden his wife like that. He’s ungrateful and silent and perpetually absent, if not on his rounds, then in spirit, and always robbing her of her sleep with his nightmares. She looks too pale and wilted these days. This was never what he intended for her. If only she would let him go back to the small cottage by the sea for a while, just until he has reassembled himself into the man she married, that husband she kissed goodbye on a pale, misty morning… But her tight embrace tells him all he needs to know, and Dwight knows it’s a near impossibility to dissuade her from an endeavour once she sets her mind to it.

 

Or maybe he simply doesn’t want to. After all, he quite likes it: the safety of being here with her, the assurance that he won’t be alone in the dark when he wakes. Her tugged up legs press into the hollow of his knee. Dwight rather likes that, too. They _fit_. Like a bone in its socket.

Ross, he remembers, a few hours and more than a few glasses into one of their late-night conversations, had once put a firm hand on the stooped shoulder of a younger Dwight in a manner almost bordering on fatherliness and warned him that differences of character would make Miss Penvenen an unsuitable match.

Back then, it had been an argument Dwight had listened to, rationally comprehended, and tried his very best to convince himself of (a futile effort that failed miserably at his stubborn heart), but now, wide-eyed in the darkness, Caroline’s body miming every angle of his own, he sees more clearly than ever. 

Oh, no doubt he could’ve courted and married some kind, hardworking girl like Rosina Hoblyn or Joan Pascoe. And such a partnership could have worked, Dwight is sure of that, who can tell, he might’ve even ended up reasonably happy - but deep down, in his heart and the very mark of his bones, he knows that no matter how peaceful, how practical such a union might have been, something would’ve always been missing. 

Someone to complete him. A counterpart.

What fools they had been to suppose a match was made up of two partners of similar temperaments, or, as Ray Penvenen had wished, of similar wealth and status, when it had always been complementarity that he’d been seeking. Her spirited disposition to his sombre introversion, his disarming honesty to her defensive flippancy, the way she had dared him to be more daring and take pride in his skills, and he’d taught her empathy in light of all the suffering, how perfectly their limbs fit together.

She was the part missing all these months, and now that they are together again, why should he – 

It’s that one small thought revolting against his guilty conscience with its utter selfishness that crosses his mind time and time again, the one he likes to entertain but always stops short of acting on.

Although…

 

Even through his shirt, he can feel Caroline’s wedding band on the hand resting on his chest, the one he placed there in what seems now like a much brighter age. There had been another ring in the pockets of his ragged uniform, one he had promised to return to a widow. After a while, all patients had started to blend into each other, but this one had stayed with him. Landsman William Thompson. Pneumonia. There had been nothing Dwight could to do but sit with him in his last hours as the life left him with every violent cough and listen to the man’s feverish ramblings about his wife, his voice seeping with longing and pain and regret. Mary, Mary Thompson, they’d been wed barely a year when he’d joined, only to escape the creditors that is, but he shouldn’t have, no, they would’ve found another way somehow, and she has the greenest eyes and the loveliest singing voice in all of Devonshire, it’s true, surgeon, all true, and now she’s waiting for him, she promised that, but he shan’t ever come home…

Months later and wrapped in warm blankets, Dwight can still feel the cold hard slap of the realization that in the far or near future, it would be him lying there, dedicating his last thoughts to his own wife. It had been strangely easy to accept his fate of never leaving Quimper alive with that kind of grim rationality and resignation that creeps in when hope leaves, but hearing this man talk, the meaning had sunk it, the whole weight of it, pulling him down and threatening to drown him in despair and regret. That this would be the end. That the rides on the beach and meetings in the woods and that one shared night at the inn were all they were going to have, and that no matter how great their love was, he had frenzied away any chance of a common future with one fateful signature.

It’s staggering, really, the proximity by which he avoided death, and incomprehensible why he did. Why is he allowed to lie here in Caroline’s arms, safe and alive and loved, when William Thompson and so many others had to die? How can he enjoy it when it goes against every principle of fairness?

But underneath the guilt, another feeling is growing. Against all odds, they have a future. Is it not more insulting to the memory of those who died to throw away the chance they wished for? What good will it do them now to question his deservingness?

 

Behind him, Caroline shifts a little in her sleep again and mumbles something incoherent into his neck. Her nightdress has ridden up her thighs and Dwight can’t stop his mind from wandering at the sensation of her exposed skin against his, back to a shabby, bare room, an awfully creaky bed and soft skin, so much of it, and too little time to commit every inch of it to memory, _too little time_ , and now it’s there, a lifetime, this life he always longed for, for him to grasp, and maybe in a while –

Maybe.

He’d forgotten how soft her body felt pressed against his own, the curves no longer hidden away by stays and stiff fabric. It’s an alien experience, still, this unfamiliar weight behind him, warm and comfortable - not unpleasant, by no means, quite on the contrary, it sends a certain thrill through him if he concentrates too hard on it, one he isn’t entirely sure he deserves to enjoy, not when so many others –

No. Not unpleasant, just unfamiliar.

At times, Dwight still finds himself thinking about the impropriety of their new arrangements before his mind supplies him with the helpful reminder that they are, in fact, a lawfully wedded husband and wife following perfectly acceptable conjugal conventions. It’s strange, starting a marriage like this - heavy breaths and tangled sheets and sweat on his brow in the middle of the night from nightmares instead of love-making, and yet…

In sickness and in health. 

He never was a man to lightly make a promise. And Caroline… Did she know what she was giving her name to when she made that pledge? Or were they just ceremonial words, their implications distant on such a bright day and brushed over in a rush of happiness and excitement? Does it matter? Whether she did or not, the tenacity with which she is keeping her promise speaks for itself. 

She gets up with him just to keep him company before he leaves to treat his patients even though he knows she’s no early riser, and stays up to make sure he eats the dinner that is part of the strengthening diet she has Mrs Bird prepare for him. She ruffles his hair when she comes sauntering into his study at late hours to tear him away from his books and affectionately scold him for leaving the bed too cold, and for a moment Dwight sees a glimpse of what their future life could be like. And it makes him think he could grow into - No. And _yes_.

The selfless thing to do would be to return to the Navy, be it out of patriotism, as atonement for abandoning his patients or to relieve Caroline of the burden he is, but there’s enough of the streak of occasional selfishness she has always tried to encourage in him to call that option into question.

Everything he has longed for and thought lost so many times, his future, their future, stretched out before them in brilliant colours… Given a second chance, why not make the most of it? He hadn’t asked for it, but offered to him, how could he refuse? His illness remains, of course, but if Caroline is determined to see him through this, just like she promised to, he might – just for once - allow himself to be selfish. The thought of her waiting gave him the strength to endure fourteen months in Quimper’s prison and he’ll be damned if with her by his side, he can’t cure this disease of the mind.

And so…perhaps. In time.

Dwight allows his muscles to relax and sinks a little bit further into Caroline Enys’ arms. 

 

He wakes later that night, a gentle squeeze of his arm pulling him from an endless sequence of the dull moaning and coughing of slowly dying men he doesn’t have the tools to save.

For a moment he lies still, feeling the sheets on his skin, listening to his panting breath, taking in the room: there’s the canopy, and the dressing table and the fruits by his bedside, all barely illuminated by the low light of the almost burnt down candle, and when he turns around there’s Caroline - there’s always Caroline, her eyes softer than he ever imagined they could be when he first met this hard young woman.

She doesn’t say a word, but reaches out a hand, carefully, almost questioning. The caution in her face sends a pang to his heart and makes him swallow hard, it shouldn’t be there, he thinks, it shouldn’t need to be there, but he doesn’t shy away. She’s all sleepy eyes and sad smile, and when her fingertips meet his skin and she gently smoothes his cheek, Dwight feels something in himself crumble.

There is no strength left in his limbs and no resistance left in his mind, and he falls into her, buries his face in the crook of her neck, and when he breathes in the faint, oh so familiar scent of her rosewater, he knows exactly where he belongs. Taken aback, a little gasp escapes Caroline, but then she wraps her arms around him and Dwight sinks into her embrace. If he could drown in this comfort, he would, he thinks and leans up again to pepper fevered kisses up her neck, desperate in his need to convey his gratitude. Caroline gives something between a startled laugh and a half-swallowed sob at this overwhelming outburst of affection. 

“Dwight,” she whispers and brings up a less-than-steady hand to cradle his head, smooth the hair out of his face like a child’s. “Dwight.” Caroline moves to prop herself up on her elbow. “Are you alright? Shall I fetch you something? What do you need?”

A wobbly laugh escapes his throat and he looks up to find her eyes full of worry, but for the first time in months, he is sure of something. 

“Time,” Dwight says and takes a deep breath. “And you.”


End file.
